Milo Slade, a 33-year-old home health-care aide suffers from habitual, unignorable impulses to do any number of odd, "pressure-releasing" actions, from twisting open the vacuum-sealed tops of jelly jars (he keeps a supply on hand in his car trunk) to inducing others to speak aloud in spontaneous conversation a random word ( "loquacious," for instance) that has popped into Milo's head.

A quote from Paula Giddings portrays Obama similarly: "That Barack Obama would choose for his life partner a nearly six-foot-tall, incredibly smart, loquacious lioness of a woman told us virtually all we needed to know about his fundamental character -- and the way he felt about us."

Among the road blocks, there are, for starters, the numerous theories -- highly loquacious in cyberspace -- that contend not only that flu vaccination is overtly dangerous, but that there is a systematic effort to delude the public about those dangers.